now you know I used this picture to

represent my class and you might not

know anything about this picture it's

it's a picture of Jonah being thrown up

out of whales belly after spending three

days inside it it's an old biblical

story it's a myth it's a fairy tale

that's that's one way of looking at it

and and I don't mean that derogative

manner we know for example that some of

the Grimm's brothers fairy tales are

perhaps fifteen thousand years old

they've been traced way back they're

really really old and old stories are

strange and they're strange because well

they've been told generation after

generation after generation and so you

could imagine that something retold over

such an expand of expansive time has

been reduced to its gist many many times

and nothing that's in the story anymore

is superfluous it's all meaningful in

some sense it's sort of like a meta

story that's one way of thinking about

imagine that you took a hundred books

hundred adventure books and you had to

extract out the central features of an

adventure book now it's hard to do that

it's like you're averaging across them

or something like that

distilling them in some manner then you

get a meta adventure and it would be

like a myth upon which all adventures

are based and this story is actually one

of those stories and I'm going to tell

you what I think the story means and I'm

not saying that this is all it means

because most stories of this sort are in

some sense inexhaustible just like great

works of art are inexhaustible there

there's more information in them than

you can possibly articulate that's what

makes them profound that's why you go

look at them otherwise someone could

just tell you about the painting and

that would be the end of that but that

doesn't work so so that Jonah is being

spit up by this whale and of course on

the face of it that's an impossibility

because well

you can't live inside a whale that's why

it's impossible now you may remember and

likely do that you all know a story

about someone who is inside a whale

that's Pinocchio right and you know you

go to that movie maybe even as an adult

you watch that movie and Geppetto is

down there in the whale in his little

boat you know it's big cavernous inside

you don't really care that that's

there's a bunch of things you don't care

about you don't care that those are

drawings and not real people you don't

care about that and you don't care that

the inside of a whale isn't a cavern and

you don't care that Pinocchio is a

puppet for that matter none of that

matters to you at all and that's because

you're really strange creatures and you

don't even notice when you're doing

something absolutely absurd and that's

one of those times when you are but if

someone taps you on the shoulder and

says you know you're just watching

drawings of a puppet puppets can't

really move autonomously and now he's at

the bottom of the ocean you have no idea

why he's going to rescue his father and

you're just sitting there annoyed and

you're okay with that and you'll say

shut up because I want to finish

watching a movie and so that's

interesting you see that tells you

something about your unconscious if

you're psychoanalytically minded because

you're doing something that you cannot

account for now you might say well it's

it it's enjoyable

well that's deep man you're really

really going a long ways with that the

question is a why is it comprehensible B

why is it enjoyable see just exactly

what are you doing there and you think

that whatever you are doing there is so

valuable that you'll actually pay to do

it weird very very weird and you know

when you read about let's say the

archaic rituals of tribal people and you

ask yourself just what are they up to

you might think well they're up to the

same thing that you're up to when you go

see a movie so and then you might also

notice that the

most expensive artifacts or among the

most expensive artifacts that human

beings create our movies they spend

hundreds of millions of dollars on them

and we consider that a good deal and you

know it drives our technology to because

the high-tech movies like the Marvel

movies that require so much computer

animation they actually drive the demand

for high-end graphics chips so our

technological advance forward is

actually motivated in part by our desire

to represent things fictional II in ever

more spectacular manner so Jonah well

let me tell you the story of Jonah and

I'll tell you why I'm gonna tell you it

this is from Camille Paglia who's a

critic of the modern University and a

very brilliant woman I would say very

controversial incredibly rapid speaker

and she can think so fast it's just

unbelievable she's really fun to watch

if you like that sort of thing

vicious adversary in an argument she

says the number one problem in academia

today is not ignorant students but

ignorant professors who have substituted

narrow expertise and theoretical

sophistication a preposterous term for

breadth and depth of learning in the

world history of art and thought art is

a vast interconnected web work a

fabricated tradition and over

concentration on any one point is a

distortion here's here's a problem I had

I wrestled with this when I was trying

to understand some of the things that

I'm going to teach you about there's

some things that you kind of have to

grasp as a whole you know sometimes you

have a flash of insight and a bunch of

things that you didn't know we're

related fall together that that's

supposed to happen in psychotherapy when

you link different disparate patterns of

behavior together because you've linked

them say with a single cause and you get

this like excited feeling

of illumination and possibility and

there are forms of communication that

require the simultaneously the

simultaneous realization of a multitude

of disparate phenomena like a movie can

be like that

you know you you listen to a movie you

watch movie and then you don't know what

the hell is going on and then something

happens near the end and bed everything

clicks together and it's cuz you've sort

of seen the thing as a whole and a lot

of the things that we a lot of the ways

that we interact with the world that are

mysterious are like that there and this

is what peg lay is referring to is that

and this is a psychoanalytic proposition

I would say or a romantic proposition

now the idea roughly is that way out in

the periphery of reality are all those

things that not only do you not know but

you don't even know you don't know right

there you're completely blind to their

existence and then there's unknown

things that you have some suspicions

about and then there's unknown things

that you can start to imagine and and

act out and dramatize and so all of that

is on the periphery of our knowledge

that's a psychoanalytic dictum where the

thoughts come from well partly they're

nested in dreams dreams are the

birthplace of thoughts fantasy it's not

that surprising fantasy is the

birthplace of ideas you know if you're

thinking about what you're gonna do in

the future

you enter into a reverie a dream state

and you contemplate multiple

possibilities and then you start

thinking them through

use your imagination to search beyond

where you are and the collective human

attempt to do that is our mysterious

humanistic artistic tradition which is

very difficult to justify from a formal

articulate point of view

what good is dance like what is it that

you're doing when you're dancing

well you don't care because you like to

dance why well you don't know what you

do it's built into you music musics a

human universal cultures use music to

organize themselves right they use music

to catalyze their identities they use

music to unite around you know in in

more archaic societies less

differentiated societies let's say no a

mask that represents part of the family

tradition will have a particular design

and there'll be a particular song

written for it and there'll be a

particular dance about it and the song

and the dance or something like the

symbolic representation of a mode of

being in the world like maybe the mask

is a wolf mask and so you act out the

wolf and there's music that goes along

with that and you think well what are

you doing when you're acting out the

wolf and part of that is what you're

trying you're trying to understand

wolves

you know it's an image it's imitation in

part and you know if you live in the

natural world and if you hunt and if

you're preyed upon then understanding

the things that you're hunting and

preying upon is useful and there's also

pull out perhaps useful things to learn

from them and so we play this strange

symbolic game with the world like

children pretending that's another way

of thinking about it and we do that to

act out and to begin to understand

things we don't understand like how to

act that's now for me the most important

question in life is not what the world

is made of and in fact I would say

that's a relatively new preoccupation of

humankind you know we didn't really

formalize you could say that the ancient

Greeks originated laid the groundwork

for the emergence of an empirical

science and then it emerged more

formally with bacon and Descartes and

Newton five six hundred years ago not

very long like a blink blink to the eye

in human terms before that people were

engineers they could build things and so

forth but they didn't know how to

they weren't scientists they didn't

really conceptualize the world as an

objective place we do that automatically

because science has seeped so far into

our set of presuppositions that doesn't

make us good scientists by the way but

it does make us believe that the

fundamental reality of the world is an

objective reality and I'm not going to